LA COSTA  Big band icon Sammy Nestico turned 90 Thursday, and he spent it like he does every other day — at the keyboard.

The La Costa-based composer and arranger is still writing music, has two albums in the works and will be the guest of honor at two concerts of his work this weekend in Carlsbad. Retirement is not an option.

“My life has been very good. I’ve been blessed to live this long and I’m still working,” he said Tuesday. “Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and I hear the orchestra playing in my head so I need to get up and write it down. It’s just something I have to do.”

It’s not a stretch to describe Nestico as a living legend of music. He has composed or arranged more than 630 pieces, spent 14 years as composer/arranger for the Count Basie Orchestra, directed the White House orchestra under two U.S. presidents, did 63 albums for Capitol Records and wrote, arranged or conducted the scores for more than 50 television shows. He has also released six CDs of his own music and written two books, an autobiography and a textbook on orchestrating.

His many collaborators read like a who’s who of big band, jazz and pop music — Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Steve Allen, Stan Freberg and Johnny Mercer, to name a few. Toni Tennille is a good friend and producer Quincy Jones sends lavish presents to Nestico on every birthday (this year, it was a boxed set of Sinatra’s Las Vegas recordings).

“Sammy Nestico is probably the most well-known big band arranger in the world,” said Gary Adcock, trombonist for the Coastal Communities Concert Band, which will present concerts of Nestico’s arrangements and originals on Saturday and Sunday with the First Division Marine Band. “Whenever we play his arrangements, musicians just love him. His arrangements lay down right. Some things you play are herky-jerky but his are always smooth and they sound right.”

Nestico rises every morning at 6 a.m. to head out on a walk with his iPod. Neighbors have grown accustomed to seeing the white-haired man in headphones waving his arms in the air like a conductor as he walks. He uses the time to listen to his latest compositions to figure out how to edit and improve them. Next, he and his wife, Shirley, make breakfast to the music of Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov (which fires up his creativity) and then he sits down at his computer, where he uses Sibelius software to work on his music until he naps at 1 p.m.

“Some days I look at a blank monitor until noon and other days the ideas are firing and I can’t put the notes down fast enough,” he said.

Since he was 17, Nestico has been arranging music for orchestras. An arranger takes a simple melody sketch and concept from a composer and writes out all the musical parts for each instrument in a band. It’s a skill he learned over the years through a system of “hit and miss.”

“More miss than hit a lot of times,” he jokes.

The son of an Italian immigrant, Nestico grew up in Pittsburgh, where he discovered the trombone in the eighth grade and was playing six nights a week in a nightclub combo a year later. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Band, then spent 20 years with the U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps bands, where he served in the administrations of John F. Kennedy (for whom he arranged an album of Irish songs) and Lyndon B. Johnson (whose tyrannical office staff made life miserable for the band).

During his military band years, Nestico became known for what he calls the “Sammy Treatment” — warm jazzy arrangements that paint pictures with sound and enhance the lyrics. Those skills brought him to the attention of jazz pianist Bill “Count” Basie. Together, they recorded 10 albums (four of which won Grammys).

“He was a big teddy bear,” Nestico said of Basie. “Everyone who worked with him, loved him. And being with him was a great stepping stone to get my name exposed.”

In the late 1960s, Nestico and his first wife Marge moved their family to Los Angeles. He hoped to break into the recording industry but struggled for months until landing a job at Capitol Records. Working with composer Billy May for five years, they orchestrated and rerecorded 63 old monophonic albums into stereo sound for the Time Life Records label.

Nestico worked on film scores, commercial jingles and dozens of TV show themes and incidental music (“Hawaii Five-O,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*ASH” and “Emergency”), but the work was so high pressure that he calls that era “the Rolaids years.”

He also composed and arranged for numerous vocalists. He was so nervous at his first recording session with a singer that he spilled coffee all over his score on the first day. Fortunately the singer, Toni Tennille, was understanding and has become a close friend.

Some singers Nestico idolized as a young man were disappointing to work with in the studio. Crosby wouldn’t sing live with the musicians and Sinatra would only communicate through an agent. The night before the first Sinatra recording session, Nestico got a call from the singer’s producer, Quincy Jones, who had some strange instructions for the arrangements.

“Quincy said, ‘can you put a little cinnamon on it?’ I asked him what he was talking about and he said, ‘you know, add a little garlic salt.’”

Although working for the studios was lucrative, Nestico said he longed to produce his own records, so in 1985 he went solo and gradually released six albums that made very little money but were personally satisfying.

In 1994, Nestico’s wife of nearly 50 years, Marge, died of cancer. It was a dark time, but a few years later, what Nestico calls his “miracle” occurred. He met and fell in love with the former Shirley Frazier. They married and moved to La Costa in 2000. Shirley Nestico said she does whatever she can to support her husband’s musical efforts because she’s convinced they’re the key to his longevity.

“Music keeps him alive,” she said. “Recording breathes life into him and he’s absolutely ageless when he gets up in front of a band.”

Adcock said Nestico will be invited to conduct his arrangement of “Stars and Stripes” at this weekend’s concerts.

“He’s the nicest guy but he doesn’t like to draw attention to himself, so he may need some coaxing to come up,” Adcock said. “But once you get him onstage under the spotlight with the baton, then ... wow, you’ve got Sammy, and that’s really something.”

Sammy Nestico: The First 90 Years

Featuring the Coastal Communities Concert Band and First Division Marine Band